You write the perfect post, hit publish, and X chops it off at 280 characters. Or your Instagram caption looks complete in the box, but the feed hides everything after about 125 characters behind a "more" link. The limit you forgot about just ate your call to action.
Every platform draws this line in a different place, and a few moved it in 2026. Here is where each one cuts you off right now, why the same text fits one app and overflows another, and how to check your length before you post instead of after.
The 2026 limits at a glance
These are the current ceilings for the main public field on each platform β the post or caption β plus the bio where it's published.
| Platform | Post / caption | Bio |
|---|---|---|
| X (free) | 280 | 160 |
| X (Premium) | 25,000 | 160 |
| 2,200 | 150 | |
| TikTok | 4,000 | 80 |
| 3,000 | β | |
| Threads | 500 | β |
| Bluesky | 300 | 256 |
| Mastodon | 500 | β |
Two changes are worth flagging. X Premium now allows up to 25,000 characters, so long posts are a paid feature, not a free one. And TikTok raised its caption limit to 4,000 characters, up from 2,200 β useful now that TikTok captions are searchable.
A few other numbers that rarely change: a YouTube title caps at 100 characters and its description at 5,000, and a Facebook post technically allows 63,206 characters (nobody should test that).
The "first line" trap
The hard limit is only half the story. Most feeds show a short preview and hide the rest.
Instagram displays roughly the first 125 characters before the "more" cutoff. X shows your whole 280, but in a crowded timeline only the first line earns the tap. LinkedIn collapses long posts after about three lines on mobile. So the real working limit is not 2,200 or 3,000 β it's the handful of characters a reader sees before deciding to expand.
Front-load the point. Put the hook, the number, or the question in the first sentence, and treat everything after the cutoff as the reward for clicking.
Why the same text fits one app and breaks another
Copy a caption from X into another scheduler and you may find it suddenly "too long." The character counts didn't lie β the platforms just count differently.
- Emoji. A single emoji can count as one character on one platform and two or more on another, because of how the underlying text is encoded. A caption full of emoji burns through a limit faster than it looks.
- Links. X shortens every URL to a fixed length (around 23 characters) no matter how long the real link is. Most other platforms count every character of the raw URL.
- Scripts. Arabic, Chinese, and other non-Latin text can be measured per character or per byte. The same sentence in Arabic and English rarely lands on the same count.
This is why a post that fit perfectly in one place gets rejected when you reuse it somewhere else.
Check the length before you post, not after
Guessing is what gets your post truncated. The fix is to count as you write.
Paste your draft into the free Word Counter and it shows characters and words live, with the limits for X, Instagram and other platforms marked, so you can see at a glance whether you're over. It runs entirely in your browser β nothing is uploaded β so you can drop in an unpublished caption without sending it anywhere.
For headlines and titles specifically, the same approach applies to SEO: a page title is usually cut in Google's results past about 60 characters, and a meta description past roughly 155. If you write those too, the Meta Tag Generator previews them at the right length.
Quick takeaways
- X: 280 free, 25,000 on Premium. Bio 160.
- Instagram: 2,200 caption, but only ~125 show before "more." Bio 150.
- TikTok: 4,000 caption (raised in 2026), and captions are searchable. Bio 80.
- LinkedIn: 3,000, collapsed after ~3 lines on mobile.
- Threads & Mastodon: 500. Bluesky: 300.
- Emoji, links, and non-Latin scripts all count differently β never assume a post that fit one app fits the next.
- Count before you publish with a live character counter so nothing important lands past the cutoff.
Platforms adjust these numbers without much warning, so when a limit really matters β an ad, a launch, a bio you only get to set once β paste the text in and check the live count rather than trusting a number you remember.
